Thoughts on Life, Love, Politics, Hypocrisy and Coming Out in Mid-Life

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Hillary Slays Dragons, Loses 3 Opponents in One Week

Some on the right in particular thought that October would be a disastrous month for Hillary Clinton. With only a week left, so far the month has turned out to be the complete opposite. Yes, her campaign is still fraught with dangers, but she has seen three would be opponents end their campaigns and the Benghazi Committee failed to do her any damage despite the best efforts of the GOP members. Pieces in Vanity Fair and Salon at Hillary's surprisingly positive month. First are excerpts from Vanity Fair:

On Friday, former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee
announced that he would drop his bid for the White House, making him
the third Democrat to either drop out or forego joining the race against
Hillary Clinton.

With his
exit, Chafee shall be forever remembered in this cycle as the third
Democratic Clinton rival to disappear in a single week: former senator Jim Webb exited the race on Tuesday, and shortly afterwards, Vice President Joe Biden, whom many saw as a potential challenger to Clinton, announced that he would not seek the bid.

That, combined with her well-received performance
at Thursday’s 11-hour-long hearing before the House’s Select Committee
on Benghazi, has made this a pretty good week for Clinton.

Then there are these excerpts from Salon:

The end of the [Joe] McCarthy witch hunt did not end conservative hostility to the State Department.

This suspicion of the State Department has continued even in
Republican administrations. During the Reagan administration Secretary
of State George Schultz was famously at odds with Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and there was little love lost between the Bush administration’s Dick Cheney and Colin Powell.
When the Democrats have the executive branch it’s much, much worse.
There is just something about the State Department that drives
conservatives a little bit crazy.

Of course nothing on earth drives them as crazy as Bill and Hillary Clinton, their most hated enemies. The Republicans wasted tens of millions of dollars back in the 1990s trying to destroy them.It should, therefore, come as no surprise that when the radical right’s
decades-long mistrust of the State Department combined with their
decades-long crusade against Hillary Clinton, the result would be an
incoherent howl of suspicion, confusion and inchoate rage. Throughout
that marathon hearing yesterday, if there was a theme, a theory or even a
rough guess about what Clinton was supposed to have done, it was
extremely hard to see what it was. Under the leadership of Trey Gowdy, a
man reputed to be a crack prosecutor, the Republicans were disorganized
and unprepared, lurching from one topic to another without connecting
any dots or explaining to the nation just what in the world this
torturous exercise was supposed to achieve.

So it’s about spies in the State Department. As usual. Only this time
it’s Hillary Clinton, their most hated nemesis, the one who simply
won’t go down no matter how hard they hit her. The frustration was
palpable.

Joe McCarthy was eventually brought low by his own
hubris. A man named Joseph Welch put the final point on it when he said,
“at long last sir, have you no decency?” It was Congressman Elijah
Cummings who made the similarly powerful moral statement in the hearing
yesterday when he said:

“I
don’t know what we want from you. Do we want to badger you over and
over again until you get tired, until we do get the gotcha moment he’s
talking about?

“We’re better than that. We are so much better. We
are a better country. And we are better than using taxpayer dollars to
try to destroy a campaign. That’s not what America is all about.”

The good news is that if yesterday’s hearing is any example, today’s witch hunters are all ham-handed Kevin McCarthys
instead of Tail-gunner Joes. Right wing conspiracy nuts aren’t what
they used to be. Maybe we’re making progress after all.

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Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
In the career/professional realm, I am affiliated with Caplan & Associates PC where I practice in the areas of real estate, estate planning (Wills, Trusts, Advanced Medical Directives, Financial Powers of Attorney, Durable Medical Powers of Attorney); business law and commercial transactions; formation of corporations and limited liability companies and legal services to the gay, lesbian and transgender community, including birth certificate amendment.

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